Monday, 23 July 2012

Bug: AIR for Android, SharedObject and File

While working on a recent AIR for Android application, I found myself pulling my hair out over a strange bug. To speed up application development, I was persisting some of my application VOs using SharedObject, e.g:

This had been working flawlessly for some time, and I had little reason to suspect it. The symptoms were particularly painful: after the application had finished with one View, persisted the data and attempted to move onto the next View, the application would unexpectedly close. There was no error, no crash and no stack trace.

Thankfully, my persistence layer had already been abstracted into a service, and I was able to implement an empty version and plug that in with little effort. With this in place, everything worked fine, so I was confident it had something to do with the SharedObject persistence. I needed to debug things further, but didn't want to spent hours rewriting the application.

Identifies a property that should be omitted from data that is sent to the server when an ActionScript object is mapped to a Java object using [RemoteClass].

However, it can be used to provide hints to the SharedObject serialization system on which fields to ignore: marking any fields with [Transient] will see them ignored by SharedObject. By using this trick, I was able to use a binary search to very quickly identify which field was causing the problem. It turned out that a File instance containing a reference to a captured photo was causing a low-level crash with the AIR runtime, when it was serialized to a SharedObject; the same location stored in a String presents no problem (and, for that matter, files pointing to other locations present no problem).